So I’ve been working on making a set of badges using a series of artistic animal pieces. I’ve just cut the first one, having designed it in illustrator and it’s come out pretty lovely, just the right dimensions for all the fixings.

Without the actual ai file to scrutinise it’s hard to guess. The svg file has clearly divided into 4 segments that don’t line up even if you grab them and try lining up the shapes. Did the engrave take long?

Ah yes. The ai is tiled. Looking at the line work, did you get ai to trace an image? It will work but you’ll have to manually fix all the lines where they are offset.
What jbmanning5 suggests would work but you’ll still need to fix your original.

I didn’t do anything actually. I imported the svg of the art as it was sent to me, placed it into the badge design and then exported. My original doesn’t show any of the misalignment that seemingly developed when I exported the badge to the final svg.

Hopefully If I make a copy and rasterize the graphic section as @jbmanning5 suggests that will solve the issue for the next export.

Rasterizing it will basically give you a WYSIWIG. Designing for print is quite a bit different than designing for a laser (vector wise). The shortcuts don’t work so well. The files have to be precise. That’s not your fault; it was the file you were sent.

To clarify what I believe you’re seeing here - where the image is tiling, you have vector elements that overlap. The Glowforge does not like vector elements that overlap - it tends to knock them out. I suppose one of two things could happen - it could engrave them twice (which would be noticeable), or it can (and does) ignore/knockout the overlap (which is also noticeable).

I didn’t look over the whole file but I suspect there are other little areas that aren’t pixel perfect and overlap a bit.

I dragged the upper right quadrant over a pinch, and ran a pathfinder>unite operation. Then I ran Object>path>simplify>98% to reduce the node count by almost half and fudge the edges where the quadrants didn’t quite match up.
Here is is on a leather coaster from JDS:

I would still rasterize. Since engraves are raster operations anyway, and we know the Glowforge software has trouble rendering SVG, my standard procedure now is to rasterize any engraves in Illustrator at 600dpi before exporting the SVG. Then I know exactly what it’s going to look like and GF doesn’t have to do any hard work like putting one pixel on top of another or understanding the difference between even and odd.

In general, rasters seem to be reliable, though there is still some confusion between transparent and white, so I make sure to tick the box for transparent backgrounds.